Apple: Is the mighty tech giant rotten at the core?

The adjective “ironic” is much misunderstood, laxly employed by people who use it as a synonym for “coincidental” (“it was ironic that it started raining when I happened to go out without an umbrella …”). No, irony, as the late D J Enright demonstrated in his classic work The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony (1986) is a great deal more complicated, a great deal more soul-eviscerating, a great deal more redolent of existential blight than the happenstance of a very minor misfortune.

On the other hand, there was something unmistakeably ironic about the juxtapositions of mid-November’s newspapers. These were dominated by advertisements for Danny Boyle’s biopic of the former Apple potentate the late Steve Jobs, whose reviews (“sings with energy” – Scotsman, four stars from Mark Kermode) left no doubt as to its merits. A TV trailer seemed to suggest that, a few personal failings possibly notwithstanding, Jobs was a kind of secular saint in whose debt most of humanity pretty much reposed and that we should all be thankful that his near-miraculous prising open of the techno-toolbox had happened in our lifetime.

Curiously enough, the same newspapers offering endorsements of Jobs’s wide-screen commemoration also harboured a clutch of news stories touching on the detrimental effect that technology seems to be having on our lives. One came from Italy, where a home textiles company was reported to be banning all internal emails in a one-week trial designed to cut workplace stress. According to the managing director, Emilio Colombo, enquiry had revealed the mounting volume of email traffic to be one of the main sources of workplace dissatisfaction. It scarcely needs saying that the message containing this information had been circulated in an email.

Another warning came from Denmark, where investigators from something called the Happiness Research Institute had suggested that a week off from Facebook could make you happier. Here 1,095 daily Facebook users had been split into two groups, one forbidden from liking portraits of their friends’ pets, the other clicking away as normal. Seven days later, those denied access to the screen were adjudged to be 55 per cent less stressed. Naturally, there was a geographical context. Or, as the institute’s boss rather poetically put it, “Facebook is a constant bombardment of everyone else’s great news, but many of us look out of the window and see grey skies and rain – especially in Denmark”.

A glance at the last couple of hundred years of great inventions or developments in industrial or mechanical processes, in Denmark or anywhere else, would suggest that, whatever the nature of the innovation, certain procedural rules apply. One of them is a wholesale lack of reflection on the part of those doing the innovating and those being innovated for. And, to be fair to everyone involved, this readiness to throw prudence to the winds is entirely understandable. Nobody, having invented the internal combustion engine, is going to undertake a 20-year study on the likely effects of increased fossil-fuel use on the planet’s eco-system before filing a patent application. No, the important thing is to get as many of the things on the production line as possible.

The same applies to every other guarantor of “civilisation” from the howitzer to nuclear fission. One opens the bright, shiny package, admires the item within and instantly throws out all the somehow less bright and shiny items that it instantly supersedes. Any objections may be dismissed with a bromide or two about the inevitable – and, it scarcely needs saying, desirable – march of scientific progress and a murmur or two about “Luddites”, and questions, if there are to be questions, can safely be left to a period so remote in time that the artefact in question has a) become embedded in the cultural-cum-economic landscape and, such is the pace of innovation these days, b) very probably transformed into something even brighter and shinier than before.

Philosophically, arguments of this kind are almost impossible to resist: the person who, for example, ventures that not all scientific innovations are ipso facto a good thing and that humanity would probably be better off if certain inventions were permanently becalmed on the drawing board can nearly always be squashed with a sorrowful rejoinder of the “Don’t you want medicine to improve so that fewer people die?” sort. It is the same with the so-called political “progress” of the later 20th century, whose present-day consequences are such that you sometimes wonder whether the collapse of the hegemonies of the old Soviet bloc wasn’t quite the miracle it was represented to be, and we would all be a lot safer in the former West if the Iron Curtain had stayed in place.

This is a cynical remark, no doubt, but exactly the same kind of reaction is prompted by the press ads of Michael Fassbender, Seth Rogen, Kate Winslet and Jeff Daniels looking all noble and determined in the service of technological empowerment. For, 20 years after the first real stirrings of the internet cyber-beast, our fixation on technology has all the makings of a piece of Orwellian double-think. On the one hand, most of us have swallowed the Silicon Valley line that social media, mobile phones and Twitter are a beneficial and liberating force. On the other, it takes only a few moments spent in a commuter train heading home – full of whey-faced worker ants nervously kow-towing to some cyber-tyrant – to appreciate some of the demoralising consequences of an endlessly connected 24/7 world for the individual human spirit.

The City of London, to particularise, was bad enough when I worked in it in the 1990s, but how much more soul-sapping must it be now, when the martinet in the suit can compel you to be “have a catch-up” three hours after close of play when you and he know that you should both be reading to your children. The psychological consequences of this tyrannising have scarcely been examined. Quite apart from the swindle of its economic model – continual evolution in which everyone has expensively to participate whether they like it or not – the techno-fest on which we are all embarked is based on a fundamental piece of presumptuousness, or rather a misapprehension. It assumes that perpetual connectedness – reflected in the time-worn slogan “It’s good to talk/tweet/email” – is a benefit, when it may be a profound disadvantage.

Simultaneously, it believes that constantly being in low-level and for the most part inconsequential connection with large numbers of people is “liberating” and “empowering” when its ultimate effect is thoroughly autocratic – not much more, in fact, than suborning you to a dimly perceived but no less ominous collective will that is all the more devitalising for having no corporeal existence, and where the emotional response comes pre-digested. I never watch those sinister ads for phones or iPads or the “togetherness” of Facebook without thinking of the immortal Elvis Costello song about the radio being in the hands of “such a lot of fools trying to anaesthetise the way that you feel”.

Meanwhile, to go back to Mr Jobs, the great secular prophet of this new movement, you have an awful feeling that history’s eventual verdict will be that here was a man who, albeit with the best possible intentions, began with the aim of setting people free and ended up by enslaving them even further. It is quite possible, once the dust has settled and the human consequences been reckoned up, that Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin will be found to have done less damage to individual will and personal identity than the lords of cyberspace. To have all this lovingly celebrated in celluloid is perhaps the deepest irony of all.